The Linux Ninja

Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder of MySQL and founder of Monty Program AB, announced the creation of the Open Database Alliance with Percona, a MySQL services support form.  The Open Database Alliance is

a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

The goal of the Open Database Alliance is to unify all of the MySQL-related development going on. This definitely makes me feel alot better about the future of MySQL after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. I still worry that Oracle will work at closing off development of MySQL or withhold key features for paying customers, but having a new project spearheaded my Monty gives me hope that we will always have an open source version that can compete with Oracle’s version.

I have speculated previously about what would have happened to Sun’s projects if IBM bought them, but had never considered Oracle a serious contender for acquisition. Well, they surprised me and they have acquired Sun for $7 billion. This appears to be not great news for MySQL as Oracle’s main product is their database. I’ll be following this story closely over the next few days as more details come out and we get a better idea of what Oracle plans to do with Sun’s properties. Hopefully this works out well for both sides and no massive layoffs / project cancellations come of it…